Start Talking
by shelter
Summary: One-Shot. She's fishing for someone familiar to settle her guilt once and for all. But not every girl Yoruichi picks up is going to play by her game. Rated T for suggestions of sex. Comments appreciated.


**START TALKING**

_A Bleach Short Story_

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_This story would not have been possible without the efforts of **LizzayBT** who helped to proofread & edit._

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**DISCLAIMER: **I do not own Bleach. Nor do I wish to.

(It seems that in my long absence from , writers seems to refer to Soi Fon as _Sui Feng_ now. I didn't want to make the name-change because Soi Fon/ Sui Feng isn't really the focus of the story.)

**RATING:** T (for suggestions of sex)

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**1.**

"Is this it?"

She's brought to a place where the humans entertain themselves. She guesses this from the long current of well-dressed living bodies indiscriminately waiting in the open, waxy with fluorescent streetlight. They are anticipating something. She throws a glance around, about, along the humans, all scattered around this small corner of the city: no _reiatsu_. She tries harder. Nothing.

"Yes, Yoruichi-san. The person you need is inside."

"Guaranteed?" She tries to incite her guide with customer curiosity.

Standing, her guide only reaches up to her shoulder, wearing shades which make her face look as if it's been underwater too long. The scarf around her neck is so ragged and artistically frayed it could've been a strangling hand. But she shows a smile with too much lower lip, mouth curving too much into its right corner. She only repeats what she's told Yoruichi before:

"You risked coming all the way here, and yet you doubt now eh?"

She wants to tell her: no, I make risks like this every day for someone else – and immediately, she imagines Kisuke tending to the most infected of their friends alone at their safe house – but she decides to cross her arms. Her guide adjusts her shades. They seize the artificial light and fire it back at her.

Everything has been a risk, of course, a kind of gamble. Her trust in that self-proclaimed prophet Kisuke, her willing exile from Soul Society for him and those poor souls, and now this – what's she doing here?

But she's here anyway – somewhere along the line she must've believed what this dubious guide had offered. What had started as a tactical manoeuvre to lure her away from the safe house had, somewhere, become a transition into belief. And now, at their third meeting, she had dragged Yoruichi halfway across the city, away from the safety of the safe house's improvised _reiastsu_ defenses, into where human faces became younger, the streets more shabby, the buildings mere blocks of concrete, their faces decaying, the eyes of their windows permanently blinded with wooden planks.

She bites her lower lip, and waits. The crowds outside filters through a shuttered doorway, but most of them are already drunk and rowdy, bent on accumulating their own pleasure. The men in their long overcoats have at least a girl on each arm. And the girls, eyes outlined with tar-black, squirm against them.

"So?" her guide asks.

"Can you get me in?"

That smile again: "Did you bring that artificial body of yours?"

"_Gigai_," Yoruichi corrects her. "Yeah."

"Whatever. Then let's party."

It's funny. But when she slips into her _gigai_, she thinks of Kisuke. She thinks of his reaction when she had asked for him for one.

"What?"

She pictures him: his rapid movements, pale face jutting out from shoulders like the arch of a great bridge. He tends to those infected by the hollow poison like a father, telling them not to fear, motivating them to try out their new powers. When something happens, as it always does, he just flattens his back to the wall and smiles at her.

The _gigai _he had designed stretches to take the shape of her arms. It feels tight around the armpits, at the crook of her knees. It feels like trying on a shirt for the first time. She flexes her arms, cracks her fingers, breathes deeply. As with most of Kisuke's work, this is close to perfect.

"A _gigai_? –

"A _gigai_ doesn't do you justice –

"Really."

She could not tell if he had been joking or flirting. She had brushed it aside, and insisted. Of course, he relented.

Now, she runs her shoulders in circles, letting his work fill the spaces in between her neck. She holds up her right arm, the deep butterscotch of her biceps. It's Kisuke's work, she knows. She gives a signal to her guide that she's ready. They move to where the line of humans is.

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**2.**

It's funny – now. The eyes of the humans in the line waft over to her. And she thinks of Kisuke's words before she left:

"Disappearing again, eh –

"When will you give this up? –"

As her guide ushers her through the doors, she thinks of him waiting by the door of the safe house for her.

She knows he will be disappointed.

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**3.**

It's dark. And hot. But as she adjusts to her _gigai_'s sense of its surroundings, things – shapes – people display themselves in the darkness. And when the door closes behind her, it's not dark at all.

She sees bodies – lush, vibrantly-lit, colourful – a thousand of them, immersed in coiled spirals of smoke. They move recklessly: crashing, sliding, ceaseless, crashing again. They move in and out of each other.

She wants to say something, but her voice doesn't sound. They walk. Then all her senses begin to feedback: the chronic stench of other people's sweat – the hush of steamy puffs of breath mixing the smoke – sparkling, bursting, exploding flashes of light – an intense of undertow of noise and sound that hurts her ears.

Her guide elbows past bodies, nudging them aside as if she's creeping through the cracks of a cliff. As Yoruichi mashes her way through, she feels hands. She catches one, but they're all over her. One paws its way across her thighs, another along the ribs. She can't see their faces in this sweat-heavy darkness. She can only see them smiling, pushing out the tips of their teeth, a glossy pale white.

The lights ahead bloom and die so fast her eyes begin to see in five colours at once – and where's her guide? She crams into the bodies, spots the fleeting back, and calls out to her. The moment the words fly out of her mouth, the monstrous echo of whatever music filling this place smothers them. She corrects herself, pulling the _reiatsu_ into her own legs, and almost sprinting forward. The buzz of the music whips through her ears – low, deeper than humming, deeper –

"Relax, Yoruichi-san."

Her guide waits by a counter. Drinks stand guard by its edge. Yoruichi can't tell if it's the liquid or the glass dangerously sparkling in the thousands of flashing lights.

"What is this place?"

"A happy place," her guide says. Yoruichi sees her eyes contract, narrowing into snake-like exaggeration as she adds: "A safe place."

"Safe?"

"No _Shinigami_ would come here."

"Where is she?"

Her guide seizes a cup, takes a slippery shot of her drink. The liquid flashes and descends, pulsing into the bulge of her throat, thrust upwards. When she lowers her glass, Yoruichi can see her lips aglow, washed with watery residue. She's still looking at those lips when her guide latches her arms to her neck, like a too-tight necklace. Her face brushes hers.

"Why are you so tense today, Yoruichi-san?"

Yoruichi feels the heat of the liquid blasting in her ear, the deep breathing at the dip of her earlobe – Her guide smiles:

"This make you feel better? –

"Reminding you of someone? – "

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**4.**

It does. And as Yoruichi cradles the plush, bulky body of her guide, her face too close, she tries to think of the many, many times she's done this. To someone else. In another place.

"Do I remind you of someone?" her guide asks again.

Yes. She tries to imagine – who else – Soi Fon, holding her bare shoulders or lending her a hand up on one of their many missions. She tries to picture her sweeping through the Shihouin mansion on her sentry duties. Yoruichi didn't trust anyone but her to protect her family home, the headquarters of the much over-hyped Second Division. She can see Soi Fon as she always is: her body like a clenched fist, her frown made severe by the candles throwing light around her quarters, the light caramel colour of her fingers in twilight –

Even how Soi Fon, back then, would always ask:

"Why are you always looking at me like that, Yoruichi-sama?"

She thinks of the evening wind, making the candlelight dance, ghosting through the curtains at her old mansion, and Soi Fon standing guard outside: the only shadow nestled against the night.

And – her guide lowers her lips onto her fingers, smearing them with saliva or drink or both. The cramped, stale chill of her surroundings return: the blaring, toneless boom of music and the thrashing lights everywhere.

"You get excited so easily," her guide says, pulling away from her.

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**5.**

They edge through the dancing crowd, creeping deeper and deeper into the centre of the chaos, where a powdery shroud turns all humans into darkened silhouettes against the impossibly bright lights. Her guide tugs on her hand. In the crowd she negotiates her way through, even as the humans around her thrust their hands, arms, faces, elbows out to the persistent hammering of sound.

Her guide stops, surfaces from the dark to meet her face-to-face. Her face twists into a short smile, and she points into the air, ahead, into the crowd.

"There she is," she says.

Yoruichi looks ahead. Nothing. Just bodies. But her guide prompts her. The second time she sees things: a circle of girls highlighted by the starry spectrum of changing lights – and another girl, in the centre, the object of their orbit. She grinds against a partner, not missing a beat from the music. Yoruichi realigns her eyes. Through the absolute mayhem going around her, she spots the straight-cut of coal-black hair, the short sideburns and the long bangs. There's no mistaking it.

"Is that –?" Yoruichi asks.

"Yes."

"Wait."

But it's impossible. Perhaps a cheap visual trick, perhaps an impersonator that her guide has skillfully placed in this troublesome location to bait her. Perhaps – Her guide pulls her close, and smirks, again:

"I told you. Things have changed since you ditched Soul Society."

Yoruichi wants to protest: she _had_ to ditch her. But she catches the girl's movements, the way she slides against the other girl, the white slice of skin showing from her torso where her shirt has ridden up. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps – and she remembers Soi Fon and herself alone in her old mansion - in with the stubs of the candles still coughing out pale grey fingers of smoke.

The music changes. The girl stops and walks away. She doesn't know what she's going to do yet, but Yoruichi is already walking in her wake.

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**6.**

Kisuke never believes her. For a person who claims he can exorcize the disease that's afflicting their fellow Soul Society deserters, she thinks: he's such a two-faced skeptic.

"You still believe there are second chances?" he had said, in his hangover-heavy voice.

Yoruichi remembers this, too. It's just after she has convinced herself she should see whether what the guide had been telling her was true. Twice, the guide had made advances to her, or so she had claimed. Why not give it shot?

"You know: it's no use dreaming about people who don't have any place in our lives anymore," Kisuke had said.

Then he insisted: "We had no choice but to leave, we had no choice. I left people behind too."

"The trouble with you is that you don't give yourself a choice."

Yoruichi had regretted that as soon as it came out of her mouth. But Kisuke did not seem to care. And when their short talk was over, he had looked at her, gave a big sigh, and walked back to the corner of the safe house where he did his experiments. The next morning, he had her _gigai_ ready.

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**7.**

She confronts her at a corner of the huge space where she's busy downing three shots of the bad-smelling liquid her guide took earlier. It takes her ten whole seconds to compose herself, and then she decides that direct approach is what will work, now. So Yoruichi moves steadily, approaches the girl as she cleans her last shot and says:

"Soi Fon."

The girl's fists clamp, her drink falling aside, her entire frame shrivel as if bracing for an attack. But Yoruichi sees only the eyes: shallow, still, like the vision of someone reeling from being bashed in the head. Following protocol she's learnt before from all her time in the 2nd Division, Yoruichi moves quickly and in one, two steps she has the girl in her arms. Because she knows that, if this really is Soi Fon, she would definitely follow protocol too:

To never struggle when you are ambushed and cornered, but wait till things have calmed down.

The music lowers its tempo. It's a slow song. As slow as someone suffocating to death, Yoruichi thinks. She has the girl snuggled in the crook of her elbow, her entire head lying in the contour of her biceps. She holds her still, letting her breath scrape the hairs on her arm. She concentrates on that regular pulse of breath – the only indicator that she is alive – waiting, to either let go or snap off her head with an upward thrust of her arm.

Yet as she stands there, the lights swirling trance-like in circular spreadsheets across the wall and all over her skin, the breathing eases and then almost completely stops. When Yoruichi peers down, the lights blot out the face staring back at her. But – again, the eyes, are no longer shallow – but instead: reflecting, deep, so clear and crisp they swallow the light. She looks up, and returns to bury her face in Yoruichi's arm. And Yoruchi's lips alight on her forehead.

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**8.**

Once, Yoruichi remembers holding Soi Fon just like this. Just like she holds her now: head lowered, so close that she feels her temple drilling into her sternum, the hush-hush-hush of her breathing, splitting the divide at her elbow. Only once. Yoruichi tries to remember it:

"You need to create an atmosphere of discomfort. Less words, more actions."

Yoruichi can only assemble this particular once: a practice interrogation session, years before, at the headquarters of the 2nd Division. She had been teaching her officers something – something to do with cramped spaces, prisoners and getting people to talk. She had said something, about knowing the prisoner like a lover, knowing what to do or say, to plant a correct cocktail of fear and uncertainty to –

"Make it as uncomfortable as possible for your prisoner so she'll see no alternative but to start talking. The more aloof you are, the more she'll think she needs to talk in response."

The touch she took had been slight. She knew some decorum needed to be maintained when doing things in front of subordinates. But she had been deliberate too: Soi Fon and her, alone, the eyes of everyone watching, the silence between them, the circling, so much like a vulture around something almost dead –

"This is just a demonstration, ok?"

Yoruichi knew she could disarm Soi Fon with a single touch. All she needed to do was to keep the friction between them constant: a hand clawing a shoulder, her thigh too close to Soi Fon's withdrawn arms, a drawling finger along the back of her neck. And when Soi Fon had begun to show signs of inability to cope, Yoruichi had wrapped her arms around her, took her head as if wanting to absorb it into her own heart, all the other officers still watching.

"Is this a game, Yoruichi-sama?" Soi Fon had asked, her voice hot with uncertainty.

"Yeah it is."

But after the debriefings were done, everyone had been dismissed and she was alone with her, Yoruichi had sat on the same chair where she had supposedly made Soi Fon break down a while ago. She had sat down, and thought – imagining the seeping warmth where she held Soi Fon – unsure of what she had been doing.

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**9.**

When her guide plies her with her fourth cup, Yoruichi knows, she is getting smashed.

Her guide effortlessly throws her head back and clears a glass of the luscious-looking liquid she has just been passed over the counter top, while Soi Fon wordlessly swirls hers in a glass. Yoruichi views this – all with a certain glaring haze blooming out from everything she sees like a divine inner light. She adjusts herself by the counter. She isn't exactly sure how the three of them came to be in this position, but she finishes the drink anyway.

The wave of warmth hits her. When it departs, she's compensated by the heavy heat of Soi Fon leaning her back against her chest.

She knows she's losing her sense of the surroundings when the noise now actually sounds like music, the deep bass beats pouring throughout the vast room now starting to sound like slurring baritone voices. When her guide offers her another drink she wants to refuse. She's withstood the _sake_ outings at the _Seiretei. _But she isn't sure how much alcohol a _gigai_ can endure.

A gesture from her guide – Soi Fon gets to her feet: these motions wake her. She turns to devote her eyes to Soi Fon's movements. She seems to beckon to her, and when she can't make out the words, both Soi Fon and her guide move to her.

"We're leaving," her guide says.

Yoruichi falls forward, onto her feet. She feels Soi Fon's fingers lace around her hand, and she allows herself to be led away from the strong odour of the still-moving mash of bodies. The lights are really hurting her head – the deadweight in her stomach – her lingering discomfort of sweat lubricating every corner of her body in this tight, pressing space, like being trapped in a rapidly shrinking room –

They pass out into the night, and the night air rushes at her face. Yoruichi wants to remove this troublesome _gigai_. But Soi Fon's still holding her hand and as she stands against a road emptied of cars, sparkling with dirty yellow lights like dying stars falling to earth, Yoruichi thinks, she looks beautiful.

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**10.**

It takes a while, but Yoruichi catches shots of the scenery: traffic lights passing signals to deserted roads, an overturned dumpster, up a set of spiral staircases at the back alley of a building, and a window stuffed with dusty venetian blinds. Soi Fon flicks on the light.

Yoruichi's surrounded by the blunt darkness of an apartment. Everything about it reminds her of Kisuke's cramped safe house: bed and sofa in the same space, picture-less walls stained with handprints and a dark interior untouched by a single light bulb swaying from its tether.

"Where –" she tries.

But Soi Fon presses her to the bed, and the look on her face is both serious and determined. In a split second of uncertainty, Yoruichi doesn't want this. It's not right, it's not proper, especially not after so long –

"Are you afraid, Yoruichi-sama?"

She isn't. She hasn't been afraid of anything in years, except her subordinate's own safety. That's all. She feels the trail of moist friction Soi Fon's lips have left at the ridge of her collarbone. Beyond Soi Fon's lowered head, she sees the room in halves – its bright half and its black shadowy other – and –

"I'm not – Soi Fon, is there anyone else here?"

She can't tell. But a sense of something – _reiatsu_ maybe – burns at the end of her dazed vision.

She can't tell, really, not now – with Soi Fon's tongue at her lips, then her throat and now lapping from the pool of sweat at the base of her neck. She grasps that head, the object of her desire – right?

There's that foreboding again. Something – Yoruichi turns, but Soi Fon tugs her back, and now the front of her shirt is open, and Soi Fon buries her head into her crouch. Warmth grinds into her body. And there's nothing for Yoruichi but the scent of bodies – recently dried of party sweat, the quick surfacing of Soi Fon's bare arms twirling around her own – the sharp rush of her own skin exposed –

"Is this a game?" she has to ask.

The fabric dusts off her shoulders – but her head buzzes with uncertainty drilling into it like a migraine. She takes Soi Fon's face up from her torso, wants to demand her to answer her question – but instead holds her breath and tries to drown Soi Fon's resolve with a kiss.

Then, she sees it: movement, stirring, a hooded head blossoming in the dark interior behind Soi Fon, watching, observing.

"Soi Fon –"

But she feels her arms go pass her head, held taut, her triceps stripped numb – Yoruichi's eyes fly back to Soi Fon's head, bumping into her nose as she withdraws from the kiss. Centuries of training kick in and her knee rises to jab Soi Fon away, but something – something – has locked her thigh in place. She blows a hamstring as she forces her knee up. She screams:

She understands how hollow her voice must sound, dripping with alcohol, unwilling, unprepared.

Behind Soi Fon's naked back the hooded head stirs and – and she sees it turn its face toward the light, still, ever-so quietly, watching.

"Who are you?" That's all she can manage as the cramp of her paralyzed thigh eats at her muscles.

Soi Fon's face rises. Everything is now too clear to Yoruichi: her mustache of sweat, her pale shoulders, the low fringe glued by perspiration to her forehead – the full, meaty scent of her captor's body. Yet, the voice that comes out of her mouth is heavy, foreign:

"Don't you know –?"

And: "I've been waiting for this a long while."

Yoruichi sees Soi Fon's right hand disengage itself from the trap that is her body. It unfurls into a fist, thumb slightly raised, its index finger curl deeply to emphasize its bony joint. When she sees her lower her fist below her torso, her legs slowly, forcefully being spread, Yoruichi begins to feel her breathing quicken – begins to panic –

"Yoruichi-sama, please start talking."

"No, you don't want to do this –"

When she spears her throat with that fist, Yoruichi does not believe the pain. She does not think she is screaming. Instead, she thinks she is singing, repeating the same words over and over again:

_Soi Fon – Soi Fon – Soi Fon_

But it's all she manages. Before the hood in shadow beyond gives a wide, all-knowing smile –

Before the person above her pumps an elbow into her throat.

.

.

.

_END_

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**NOTES:**

I just wanted one day to write something dark, disturbing with a slight hint of role reversal (although this probably isn't twisted enough for some of M-rated stuff I see around). For the sake of my future fanfics, I needed to rethink characters, to cast them in canon but from a different side. **I didn't want this to be just another Soi Fon x Yoruichi story**. Was I successful? Your comments are both helpful & appreciated.

This was meant to be a companion-fic to Furniture. But it was suggested that, because of the focus on Yoruichi, I should link it up with I Know What instead.

This fic was also self-contained, and reflected what I thought at the moment it was written. So treat any non-canon characters as the supporting cast.

27.12.2010.


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